That’s what YOU call a happy ending: you plundered our joint bank account, maxed out our credit cards and ran off with the Austrian masseur who looks like Arnold reborn and is twenty-eight years younger than you. While I’m home with the debts and three hungry children. Thank you, Lucille!

I know it’s not really an excuse, as if I gave a damn anyhow, but one night when my dad had grounded me and both my parents the jerks were out I got fucking drunk while listening to music and snuck down to the car park around 3 or 4 in the morning with the baseball bat and smashed that old German guy’s car window on the driver’s side, fucking mad at him because he’d complained to my dad about me playing music too loud in the middle of the night. Made me fucking mad. These old fuddy-duddies with their boring lives and need to sleep. I’m a free spirit and I need my rock, and I mean as loud as I like, whenever I feel like it. Nobody knows who I am on the Internet, that’s why I’m publishing this.

Notes
By no means recommended for copy-catting!
It’s been said about me that I can creep into anyone and speak as if I were them. This is an exercise in precisely that.
What inspired this story – besides some similar real events to those related in it – was the 2016 Italian film Fiore that portrays a girl about the same age as the first person narrator above (i.e. about sixteen, seventeen) who earns some spending money holding up people in dark passages by putting a knife to their throat and demanding their cell phone, including the password. She ends up getting caught and going to prison. The interesting thing about the character is that there is no indication whatsoever that she regrets these robberies or feels that there’s anything wrong with them. It is likely that she’ll continue where she left off once she gets out of jail.

“Hey!”
A short-haired blonde with freckles and a turned-up nose had come to a stop to let her Labrador or whatever that big black thing was take a dump at my entrance.
“Yes?”
“Better clean that up!”
A mischievous nod of obedience.
Real or fake?
I’d see in a minute. But now I had to go inside to answer that insistent phone.

… so I found myself taking trains, hopping on buses, taking my car through streets where I knew I’d get stuck in jams to have that extra time I needed for smartphone activity that I could not justify otherwise.

“So what’s your biggest claim to fame? I mean, meeting a famous person, something like that.”
This seemed an odd question considering we’d just met, having cocktails on adjacent stools at a Bahamas beach bar, but I decided to play along.
“My biggest claim to fame may be to have picked up John Ashbery at the Denver airport in my 1964 Cadillac Sedan de Ville.”
“I agree that the Cadillac is famous, but who’s John Ashbery?”
“Never heard of him?”
I could tell she never had.
“And your biggest claim to fame?”
“I was one of the people singing whimaway on –”
“The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
“Wow! How’d you guess?”
“It’s the only whimaway that’s famous as far as I know.”
“Right.”
“And you were one of the girls singing that?”
“I was!”
She sucked on her straw and gave me a bright sunshiny smile.
I could tell this impromptu communication was going places. Heck, it might even develop into a deep relationship, and all because of fame.

The useful word wuther, which has gone out of use somewhat since its heyday in the 19th century, should be revived and not be restricted to heights* alone!

To illustrate how it can be used, there are some literary quotes containing wuther:

“Oh stop it, you wuthering idiot!”
(Henry Wawa Longfellow)

“She kept wuthering and bluthering about it for several days, until she decided that this secret could not be left alone, that it had to be revealed to the world in all its wuthering mystery.”
(Georgina Eliot)

“Darling, how could you possibly doubt me? I love you to wuthereens, and you know it! You better know it!”
(A. J. Woodhouse)